Sun at Midnight. Rosie Thomas

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       CHAPTER FIVE

      With the steady approach of summer the pack ice in the scoop of bay was slowly, grudgingly, breaking up. This morning the ice was a dirty ivory colour, glinting here and there like polished bone. The expanding streaks of water were black and pewter grey under a matching sky, and a thin veil of ice fog hung over the cliffs that formed the opposite wall of the bay. Idle flakes of snow spun in the still air, floating upwards as well as down.

      Rooker replaced the engine casing of the skidoo and twisted the ignition key. The machine obligingly coughed and roared, and Valentin Petkov, the glaciologist, glanced back from where he was placing bamboo wands and marker flags out on the ice and gave a thumbs-up. The field assistant, Philip Idwal Jones, was nearby, coiling a rope. He finished it with a loop, slung it over his shoulder and trudged back through the snow.

      ‘Hey. Rook.’ The shout carried clearly in the silence. ‘Time for a brew?’

      Rooker pulled back the cuff of his glove to check his watch. It was midday and they had been out since 8 a.m. Petkov was keen to set up his markers and take the first set of readings. This part of his study, as Rooker understood it, was to do with comparing the speed of travel of the margins of the ice with the centre. If you could call it speed, he reflected, at the rate of millimetres per year.

      Philip reached the skidoo, dropped his rope and took off his fleece cap to scratch at his spikes of black hair. He had a patchy black beard to match. Phil was only twenty-six but he had been travelling and climbing since he was seventeen. This was his third Antarctic season. As a mountain guide it was his job to assist the scientists in their fieldwork and at the same time to make sure they didn’t fall down a crevasse or off a cliff.

      ‘Piece of cake, I don’t think,’ he had confided to Rooker. ‘That French bird thinks she knows it all, du’n’t she?’

      Rooker liked him.

      ‘Ta,’ Phil said now when Rooker passed him a thermos of coffee. ‘Phew. Warm, innit?’

      It was, compared with a week ago, when they had first arrived. Daytime temperatures then had hovered around –23°C, with a heavy wind chill. Today it was a mild and summery –5°C.

      ‘D’you think Valerie’s going to take a break?’ Phil wondered, looking over at Petkov who was still zigzagging across the glacier. Phil maintained that Valentin wasn’t a name at all, just a card you sent to your girlfriend if you remembered and could be bothered, and insisted instead on Val, which he then back-formed to Valerie. No one could be less effeminate than Valentin. He had a rich bass voice and a barrel chest, and a fondness for whisky and jokes whose punchlines didn’t always survive the shift from Bulgarian into English. There were six different first languages at Kandahar Station, but English was the common tongue.

      ‘Dead common,’ Phil had inevitably quipped in his thick Welsh accent.

      He beckoned to Valentin by waving a mug in a wide arc. It was hard to judge distances across the bland, grey-white face of the glacier. Only over to their left, where it suddenly tipped downhill and spilled towards the ice and the sea, splitting into a chaotic mass of seracs and twisted crevasses on the way, did its scale become more legible.

      Phil sighed when the scientist cheerily waved back, either not understanding or not wanting to stop work.

      ‘Daft Bulgar. I’ll have to take it over there. Give us one of those butties, mate.’ He took the thermos and a wrapped sandwich, and headed off across the snow again.

      The skidoo had been tending to stall on the way out from the base. Rooker had found and cleared a blockage in the fuel line. He sat on the machine now, leaning back against the handlebars with his feet up on the seat. When he had looked into the radio room this morning, Niki had told him that the warm and windless weather heralded a storm. Nikolai Pocius was the radio operator, a gaunt Lithuanian communications genius who had spent ten years in the Russian army. Niki was probably right, but it was hard to believe it in this moment of perfect stillness. When he closed his eyes, apart from the faint breath of cold on his face, Rooker thought he could be in a vacuum. The depth of silence was crystalline and absolute, without the smallest possibility – a certainty anywhere else in the world – that it would be shattered in the next second by a jet passing overhead or a burst of distorted music or the whine of traffic.

      Apart from the nine people currently occupying the two huts on a small bluff that made up Kandahar Station, the nearest human habitation was at Santa Ana, a Chilean base that lay 120 miles further up the peninsula. The Chileans maintained a snow ski-way for fixed-wing aircraft, and the Kandahar personnel had flown in there and then been transferred by helicopter to Kandahar. In partnership with the Chileans, Lewis Sullavan had leased for the summer season a pair of New Zealand-owned Squirrel helicopters with two Kiwi pilots and a mechanic. The machines and their crews would be based up at Santa Ana, but they would be available to transport Kandahar scientists out to field locations too remote to be reached by skidoo and sledge. Rooker envied the pilots. He would have liked to fly over the wilderness of glaciers, watching and trying to secondguess the extreme weather, but there was no chance of that. His fixed-wing licence was out of date and he had only flown a helicopter a handful of times.

      The silence expanded and thickened around him. He could feel it almost as a physical mass pressing inwards against his eardrums. In the ten days since they had arrived here, the peace had soothed him. He escaped outside as often as he could.

      The hut was crowded. He found it difficult to live at such close quarters with the disparate group that Shoesmith had assembled here. Dr Richard Shoesmith was the expedition leader. Rooker had taken an instinctive and immediate dislike to him, but the rest of them were mostly all right. It was the mass function that he recoiled from. People were always talking, trying to make themselves heard above the hum of the other voices. They wanted to make their mark, all of them. Even the jokes were often about scoring points off someone else, or about forming miniature alliances. Sometimes the spectacle touched him, at other times he laughed with everyone else, but he found it impossible to join in properly. The layers that protected him had thickened to the point of impermeability.

      Since he had left Edith behind he had grown accustomed to being alone. Before that even, a long time before that, he had stopped looking for company, except for sex or for someone to drink with. He СКАЧАТЬ